Afghan National Army Commando Corps

Based on Wikipedia: Afghan National Army Commando Corps

They were seven percent of the force but did eighty percent of the fighting. When the Afghan government needed someone to retake a fallen city, rescue hostages, or hunt down terrorist leaders, they called the Commandos. And when everything collapsed in August 2021, these elite soldiers found themselves stranded, isolated, and abandoned—the last ones still fighting as the country fell around them.

The Afghan National Army Commandos represent one of the most remarkable and tragic military experiments of the twenty-first century: an attempt to build, from scratch, a world-class special operations force in one of the poorest and most war-torn countries on Earth. For fourteen years, American Green Berets trained Afghan soldiers to fight like Rangers. The result was a unit that consistently punched far above its weight, conducting the vast majority of offensive operations against the Taliban while the regular army crumbled. But the Commandos' very effectiveness masked a deeper problem—one that would become devastatingly clear in the summer of 2021.

Born from Necessity

The Commandos weren't part of the original plan.

When American special forces first arrived in Afghanistan in 2001, they partnered with local militias to overthrow the Taliban. The strategy worked brilliantly in those early months. But as the mission evolved from regime change to nation-building, the United States found itself trying to create an entirely new Afghan military from the ground up. Initially, nobody thought Afghanistan needed its own special operations force.

That changed because of Iraq. The Iraqi Special Operations Forces, trained by American Green Berets, had proven highly effective. Military planners decided to replicate the model in Afghanistan. But when they sat down to design the unit in late 2006, they made a crucial decision: instead of creating Afghan Green Berets—small teams focused on unconventional warfare and working with local populations—they would create Afghan Rangers. Light infantry. Door-kickers. Soldiers trained to conduct raids and direct action missions.

The reasoning was that Afghanistan's war was different from Iraq's. The country needed troops who could assault Taliban strongholds in remote mountain valleys, not advisors who would train village militias. Afghan military leaders agreed, and they had their own institutional memory to draw on. During the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, the Soviets had trained Afghan Commandos at a base called Camp Morehead, just outside Kabul. The Americans would use the same base.

The First Class

In November 2006, a battalion from the Afghan Army's 201st Corps was selected to become the guinea pigs. They were chosen because they had unusually high morale—a quality in short supply in the Afghan military. Their commander was Lieutenant Colonel Mohammad Farid Ahmadi. Their patron was Major General Sher Mohammad Karimi, the Afghan Army's chief of operations, who had himself graduated from the Special Forces Qualification Course in the United States and understood what these soldiers could become.

Three months of intensive training followed. American advisors didn't just train soldiers; they trained trainers, creating a cadre of one hundred Afghan instructors who would help scale the program. These instructors spent six months in Jordan learning their craft. By July 2007, the 1st Commando Kandak—kandak being the Dari word for battalion—was ready for duty.

Their first mission came in September: capturing a Taliban bomb-maker in Nangarhar Province. It was a small operation, conducted alongside Afghan police with coalition advisors watching. But it worked. In November, they raided a Taliban facility in Kapisa Province. By early 2008, three Commando battalions were operational and had killed or captured thirty insurgent leaders in eastern Afghanistan.

Trial by Fire in the Shok Valley

The Commandos' reputation was forged in April 2008, during one of the most intense battles of the entire Afghan war.

The target was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord who had been fighting in Afghanistan since the Soviet era. His militia, Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin, operated from a network of villages in the Shok Valley, a remote area of sheer cliffs and narrow paths in Nuristan Province. About one hundred Commandos from the 1st Kandak joined American Green Berets on a helicopter assault into the valley.

The enemy was waiting, and there were far more of them than intelligence had predicted.

What followed was a seven-hour gunfight on nearly vertical terrain. At one point, militia fighters threatened to overrun a casualty evacuation site where wounded Americans lay exposed. The Commandos counterattacked, pushing the enemy back. A Green Beret sergeant led the charge—he would later receive the Medal of Honor for his actions that day, specifically for saving the lives of several wounded soldiers.

Hekmatyar escaped. But the Commandos had proven themselves in the most demanding conditions imaginable. They could fight.

Building the Force

The original plan called for six battalions organized into one brigade. The Afghan military wanted more: a full division with fifteen battalions. They settled somewhere in between. By 2010, six battalions were operational—one stationed in Kabul as a rapid reaction force, the others assigned to regional corps commands across the country. Four more were ordered that year.

The structure was carefully designed. Each battalion operated on eighteen-week cycles: six weeks of training at Camp Morehead, six weeks of operations in the field, and six weeks of recovery. This rhythm was meant to prevent burnout and maintain readiness. It would later prove impossible to sustain.

In 2010, the Americans created another tier: Afghan National Army Special Forces. These were soldiers recruited from the Commandos and given additional training by Green Berets, emerging as the Afghan equivalent of American special forces teams. They focused on reconnaissance and covert operations while the Commandos handled direct action raids. The two units complemented each other, but the new Special Forces also drained talent from Commando battalions, creating competition for the best recruits.

By 2011, all of these units fell under a new Afghan National Army Special Operations Command, known as ANASOC. The Commandos had grown from a single experimental battalion into a genuine special operations enterprise.

The Workhorse of the War

As the Commandos matured, they became indispensable.

In May 2010, a force of up to five hundred Taliban fighters—including foreign militants—attacked and seized the district capital of Barg-i Matal in Nuristan Province. The local police withdrew to avoid civilian casualties. The district sat astride a Taliban supply route near the Pakistani border; losing it meant losing control of a key smuggling corridor. After coalition airstrikes softened Taliban positions, two hundred Commandos conducted an air assault and retook the town, linking up with the police who had retreated.

This became the pattern. When things went wrong, the Commandos fixed them.

They raided Taliban hideouts in Kandahar Province as part of the effort to secure Afghanistan's second-largest city. They cleared insurgent bases in the remote mountains of Badakhshan. They hunted high-value targets across the country's eastern provinces. In August 2011, seven Commandos were among those killed when a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade brought down an American Chinook helicopter in Wardak Province—the deadliest single incident for coalition forces in the entire war.

The Transition That Wasn't

On April 8, 2012, American and Afghan authorities signed a memorandum of understanding: Afghan forces would take the lead on special operations missions. This was part of a broader transition as the United States reduced its presence. The goal was for the Commandos to become capable of independent operations.

On paper, progress was encouraging. In February 2013, the Commandos and Afghan Air Force executed a mission in Kandahar Province that was entirely planned, led, and implemented by Afghans. American advisors weren't involved. It seemed to prove that the transition was working.

But the numbers told a different story.

By 2017, only seventeen percent of Commando missions had been conducted independently of foreign support. Most units struggled to operate without American advisors, American intelligence, American air support, and American logistics. The reasons were systemic: the Afghan military had crippling logistical problems, endemic corruption, and operated in a country with minimal infrastructure. Commando battalions couldn't sustain operations for more than seventy-two hours without outside help.

This wasn't a failure of the Commandos themselves. It was a failure of everything around them.

Carrying the Weight of a Collapsing Army

When President Barack Obama reduced American troop levels and shifted the coalition's focus from combat to training, the Afghan security forces became entirely responsible for military operations. The date was January 1, 2015. From that point forward, the Taliban consistently expanded their territory.

The burden fell on the Commandos.

In the first six months of 2015, eighty-two percent of Afghan security force operations were carried out by Commandos and other special operations units. Remember: they were seven percent of the force. The regular army and police were increasingly unable or unwilling to fight. Many Commandos had seen more combat than their American advisors.

The carefully designed eighteen-week cycle collapsed. Battalions in their recovery phase were called back to the field. Operations stretched to twenty days. Casualties mounted. By 2016, the Commando fatality rate had doubled compared to 2014.

They were being ground down.

The Fall of Kunduz

On September 28, 2015, the Taliban captured Kunduz.

It was the first provincial capital to fall since the American invasion in 2001. A much larger force of regular Afghan troops and police had been defending the city. Many of them didn't fight. The fall of Kunduz represented both a major Taliban victory and a political crisis for President Ashraf Ghani, who had been elected just a year earlier.

The Commandos were sent to fix it.

With American air support, they fought their way into the city on October 1st. Four days of street fighting followed—house to house, block to block. By October 5th, the Afghan government controlled Kunduz again.

It was a remarkable tactical achievement. It was also a preview of what was to come: the Commandos racing from crisis to crisis, trying to hold together a security apparatus that was failing everywhere at once.

Killing the Islamic State's Afghan Leader

The Taliban weren't the only enemy.

By 2017, the Islamic State had established a regional affiliate in Afghanistan, primarily in the eastern province of Nangarhar. Unlike the Taliban, who were predominantly Pashtun nationalists, the Islamic State represented a transnational jihadist ideology that threatened both the Afghan government and the Taliban themselves.

On the evening of April 26, 2017, American Rangers and Afghan Special Forces Commandos conducted a joint raid in the Mohmand Valley. Their target was Abdul Haseeb Logari, the leader of the Islamic State in Afghanistan. The operation was a complete success. Logari was killed along with multiple other Islamic State members.

It was one of the most significant special operations achievements of the war—a reminder of what the Commandos could accomplish when properly supported.

The Final Months

In August 2017, President Ghani announced the Afghan 2020 Roadmap, which called for doubling the size of the Commando force to twenty battalions and over twenty-three thousand soldiers. The staff at the Commando Training Center opposed the plan. They were already struggling to maintain quality with the current pace of operations. Expansion would mean either lowering standards or spreading trainers impossibly thin.

By 2021, the debate was academic.

The Taliban launched their final offensive in the spring. American forces were withdrawing according to an agreement signed the previous year. As provincial capitals fell one after another, the Afghan government had only two assets capable of meaningful response: the Commandos and the Afghan Air Force.

They tried. Commando battalions were dispatched to reinforce collapsing defenses across the country. But they found themselves isolated, with no logistical support, as regular forces surrendered or melted away. The system they depended on—American air support, American intelligence, American logistics—was gone. The Afghan system that was supposed to replace it had never really existed.

Kabul fell on August 15, 2021. The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan ceased to exist. The Afghan National Army dissolved. The Commando Corps was disbanded.

What Came After

The Taliban claimed to have reactivated the Commandos with a new flag and emblem, incorporating them into their own Islamic Emirate Army. But it's unclear whether any of the original personnel or training actually transferred. The Taliban spent twenty years fighting the Commandos. Absorbing them would be complicated, to say the least.

Most former Commandos are reportedly living in hiding inside Afghanistan. Some have joined the republican insurgency—former government forces fighting against the Taliban from remote areas of the country. The hunters have become the hunted.

Others made it out. After the chaotic evacuation from Kabul airport, some Commandos reached the United States and other countries. They are now refugees, their skills and experience stranded far from the mountains where they spent years fighting.

The Lesson of the Commandos

The Afghan Commandos were, by any reasonable measure, a success. American trainers took soldiers from one of the world's poorest countries and turned them into a genuinely elite fighting force. They conducted complex operations against multiple insurgent groups. They retook cities. They killed terrorist leaders. They held the line while everything around them crumbled.

But they couldn't do it alone.

The Commandos' very effectiveness created a dependency. Because they could be relied on, they were relied on—for everything. The regular army never had to become competent because the Commandos would always show up to bail them out. The logistical system never had to work because American support filled the gaps. The government never had to address the corruption and dysfunction that hollowed out its security forces because the Commandos kept winning battles.

When American support disappeared, so did the Commandos' ability to function. Not because they weren't skilled or brave—they were extraordinarily both—but because they were never actually independent. They were the sharp tip of a spear whose shaft was made of American money, American technology, and American commitment.

The Taliban understood this. They didn't need to defeat the Commandos in battle. They just needed to wait until America left. Then they negotiated with local commanders, offered amnesty to soldiers who surrendered, and watched the Afghan military collapse from within.

The Commandos were the last to fall because they were the only ones who wouldn't stop fighting. In the end, that wasn't enough.